Raj Setty offers some great pointers for starting a business blog in his Blogging Starter Checklist:

1. Register a domain name with your name and redirect to your blog.
2. Get a "Creative Commons License"
3. Get a feedburner account and direct feeds through feedburner
4. Implement subscription chiclets
5. Enable search
6. Claim your blog at Technorati
7. Allow users to get your blog via email
8. Link to your profile
9. Link to your photo album
10. Announce your blog to the world
11. Provide a way to contact you
12. Link to your bookmarks
13. Create meaningful categories and chunk content
14. Put your photo on the home page
15. Ensure that your RSS feeds are OK
16. Geo-tag your blog at Feedmap
17. Include a blog link in your email signature

This is a great list. Be sure to check out Raj's post for the details behind each of his 17 points.

Some things I might add:

• Add Technorati tags to your posts. It's as easy as adding some hyperlinks at the end of your post, like this:Technorati tags: Tagging, Blogging

  There are some handy plug-ins for WordPress that make this even easier, like Bunny's Technorati Tags plugin and Ben O'Neill's Technorati Tags plugin.

• Add a "tag cloud" that shows what tags and/or categories are most popular on your blog. For example, check out the tag cloud on the right hand side on O'Reilly Radar. Two different WordPress plug-ins that allow you to do this are: Ultimate Tag Warrior and the Weighted Categories plug-ins.While you're at it, also add a Swiki "buzzcloud" from Eurekster to your blog. You can see an example of a buzzcloud on the Eurekster blog on the top right undeneath "Hot Searches". It's a great way to show your readers at-a-glance what search terms in your niche topic area are the most popular.
• Have a custom favicon. This allows subscribers to your blog to see this custom icon in their newsreader. Take a look at the screenshot of part of my subscription list in the newsreader I use, NetNewsWire. Notice that the Dilbert Blog, Matt Cutts' blog, and ResearchBuzz all show the same generic favicon. Custom icons would look much cooler.
• Post a Flickr badge on your blog. Here's an example (underneath "Recent Photos" on the right). You can use the badges supplied by Flickr or some free third-party ones like this one.
• Install an industrial-strength comment spam plug-in into your blog, such as Akismet or Spam Karma.
• Give your blog a boost in link popularity. Link to it from your home page and ask customers, suppliers, business partners, and colleagues to link to it too. Review my Powerpoint on link building for many more tips on boosting link popularity.

Well, it’s been six months since his last State of the Blogosphere address, but Technorati’s Dave Sifry has been busy tracking and mapping the latest trends, comprehensive results for which are to be found in his latest five-part blog post series.

Part 1 on Blog Growth reveals the number of weblogs out there has been doubling in size every five months. The folks at Technorati have found a burgeoning 14.2 million weblogs and over 1.3 billion links. 80,000 blogs are created daily and a new weblog created every second, and 55% of new bloggers are still posting three months later. Those receiving top marks for attendance are the 13% of blogs that are updated daily (yes, I am aiming to be one of them, but haven't gotten there yet... sigh!). Dave’s report on Blog Growth here.

Whether a single post is a long essay or a short entry, each qualifies as a post. The State of the Blogosphere Part 2 reports on Posting Volumes, the aggregate number of posts per day. As at July 2005, 900,000 posts were being created daily - that’s 37,500 per hour or 10.4 per second, with obvious spikes during world events such as Live 8 or the London Bombings. The full research findings on Posting Volume here.

Over 25 million blog posts now use tags for categories or topics. 12,000 are being discovered each day, and photos and links are now being tagged too. The State of the Blogosphere Part 3 Report on Tags here.

Part 4 Spam and Fake Blogs dwells on the darker side of the blogosphere – created to influence results on a search engine by filling the results with spam or fake postings, usually to some advantage. here

In Part 5, Dave Sifry reports on the The List and the Long Tail - the impact of weblogs on mainstream media, the A-list, and the measure of influence or authority of a site or blog by the number of people linking to it. here

All interesting stuff and a great place to check out if you love statistics, graphs, and a one-stop update on The State of the Blogosphere.